The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 374: Bill Whittle—No Man No Problem

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

The podcaster, YouTuber, and amateur historian ruminates on the state of Hollywood, talks about his Daily Wire project, An Empire of Terror, which exposes the dark underbelly of the Soviet Union's police state, and recounts the amazing story of Frank Luke, the forgotten top ace of WWI.   

No man, no problem is the title of this episode. My guest is Bill Whittle. I don't know if it's fair to introduce him as a historian, but I think he's more of a historian than a lot of historians I've met. Well, you know, he kind of reminds me of Dan Carlin a little bit, where he studies something so well that he can speak extemporaneously about it for long periods of time. He knows a lot of stories about the topics that at hand, he's done brilliant series in the past, what we saw, the Cold War, Apollo 11, what we saw, and he's got a new one coming out that is going to be really good. Well, that's why he's here.

I got a sneak peek this morning. It's over at the Daily Wire. It's called An Empire of Terror. Cheery little thing. Look, I've known Bill a long time. He kind of figured out the whole YouTube social. thing. His resume is a hot mess of just his background is so eclectic, but his love of history has elevated him to something larger than a fan. So whether he's an expert or not, he would

probably not want me to refer to him as an expert. Let's do it then. Expert Bill Whittle in his amazing series, An Empire of Terror quotes Stalin, who said, no man, no problem. Look, I'm kind of saying this is a public service, but I really do believe it. This series, and a lot of what Bill has done, needs to be in schools. It should certainly be in colleges, but honestly, I think it should be in high schools, and I think anybody who's really interested in showing their kids and maybe even themselves what the real arguments for socialism have been historically. And how badly those arguments have failed, demonstrably.

needs to watch this series. It's a collection of evidence that absolutely demands a verdict. I thought it was riveting better than really any series I've seen on the TV. You said something earlier today that I thought was very poignant and borderline brilliant. Oh, please tell me. You said, why is it that we don't treat the hammer and sickle the same way we treat the swastika? Because more people died under that banner than did the swastika. I wish that was true, but unfortunately, Bill said it in the conversation you're about to hear.

I just agreed with so much enthusiasm. I was there for that. He said it in the conversation? He said it in the conversation. Sweet baby, Jesus. But it's so true. I mean, if we were teaching in college, Naziism, the same way that socialism is being presented as a viable option, there would be a great hue and cry. What's happened to this species as a result of socialism and communism is so much worse.

And yet, here we are about to make the same mistakes we seem to have made already. Anyway, it's a lot more optimistic than I've just made it sound. It's a great conversation with a smart guy. If you don't know Bill, you're going to like him. If you don't know Stalin, you're going to hate him. And you're going to learn a bit more about this, oh, what do the kids call them? This ass hat. Right after this.

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Well, that was a long. It was quite a while ago. Bill Whittle, I've armed myself with a legal, pad, you'll see that there's no notes on it because we don't do that here, but I now have one because I find myself oftentimes in the midst of engaging conversations forgetting what I was going to say. I just can't bear it. So if you see me writing something down, it's just because I have an amazing point to make, and I'm scared to death and I'm going to lose it. Well, there's no chance of me possibly saying anything interesting enough to pull you off of your track, so

why don't we save some paper? The planet, Mike, you could think about saving the planet. Well, I think about it a lot, Bill. I really do. Thank you for coming back to chat. I did have somewhat of an agenda, but I'm not even going to cling to it because I know what happens when we talk. I just want to point out, first of all, there's an extraordinary curriculum vitae that Chuck has provided me. This Captain America, massage of yours on the front of his. Thank you.

Amazing. Is that all the jobs? Is that the one with all the jobs I did? It looks like it. It's a kind of resume, but it's the kind of resume that, you know, tacitly dares the reader to actually hire you. And I love that. I love that.

In fact, it dares them. In fact, it actually has to make a decision like, do I want to hire this guy or do I want to stay in business? One version of my resume I put together was I just listed all the jobs that I'd done. Yeah. You know? And my first job was a planetarium console operator with our friend Jack Horkheimer. Yeah.

I've been a security guard. I've been a waiter. I've been a limousine driver. I've been a carbon-14 lab assistant, been an astronomy lab assistant. I've been in charge of launching and recovering gliders. I've been a comedy writer, professional comedy writer. I wrote professional comedy for Kaiser Permanente, that comic giant. Because nothing says great comedic style and it's like health care.

That was the hardest work I had to do. But, I mean, I've done like everything. And you know, you're not the guy I have to convince of this. The more experience, you know, you have with real people, the less fully your you get in right quick. Isn't that the truth, man? Isn't that the truth? Well, Chuck knew me back in the days when my entire demo tape, which as you know is just a critical must-have in this ridiculous craven industry of ours, my entire demo tape was cobbled together with moments on QVC where I was actually either being fired or right prior to the firing. So I just always thought it was

fun to, you know, go a different way. But here's my favorite part of your CV. I didn't highlight it, but here we go, about halfway through under beginnings. At the University of Florida, he did not maintain the required grade point average and dropped out of college after losing his financial aid. Yeah. Seven years of college down the drain. So the first thing I love about this is that it's written in the third person. You know, he, this. This mysterious Bill Whittle character, who's obviously written this. We always speak about ourselves that way, Mike. Oh, my God.

It's so great. No, I'm a college dropout. I'm proud of it, too. I was a theater major, which I'm sure you're aware, is the B-line path to unlimited financial success. Oh, it's the gateway to every historian I've ever met to, by the way. So I learned all the stuff I learned, I learned after class in The Windjammer. There was this rundown restaurant in Gainesville, Florida called The Windjammer. And we had a back room, and we had one professor who knew what he was doing.

And six nights a week, we just kind of hang out back there. And, you know, I eat the Windjammer special, which was two pieces of white bread with ham on it and turkey and then some gravy. And this professor must have picked up enough tabs. I bet he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of the 30 years. He was there because I would have, you know, my tab might be $7 and I put down five, you know, that kind of thing. And this guy, you know, was like that. But that's where I learned all this stuff.

But you ever have those moments where you catch yourself, where you're doing something where you have a thought that you know is really, it's just a natural thought. And then part of your brain kicks in and said, that's a little beneath you. And then you grab yourself by the back of the neck, you know? And then you don't know whether to be identifying with the person who's being grabbed or doing the grabbing. You're kind of proud, but at the same time you're still ashamed, right? Sure. When I started doing a public speaking event, and I've done hundreds of them, the second or third one I did, was in, I think it was in Wisconsin. And it was a room full of people.

And I make it a point to be the last person out of the room. You know, people come to see me, I'm the last guy out of the room. You must attend. Yeah, if people have questions or pictures, I'm the last guy out of the room. It's usually because they don't pay for the hotel, you know. But I was standing there waiting and looking at the people in line asking questions, and this was very early in my career, and I think the second or third guy online was a farmer, and he was wearing the coveralls, and he looked exactly like junior samples, you know, exactly like him.

You better explain your dating. Back when we used to communicate by pressing sticks into clay in cuneiform, there was a show called He-Ha, Junior Samples was this big fat kind of country boy. He looked exactly like him. I was up there watching these lines of people coming up to ask questions, and there was a moment in between questions when I really said to myself, why do I get these guys? Why can't I be on the other side of the argument so that I can have the movie stars, you know,

and all the cool kids and all the glamorous kids? And I had that thought fully formed. And then some out of nowhere, like I slapped my own face. You know, I didn't actually do it because they would have taken me away. But seriously, in the moment, in the moment, wasn't something I thought about afterwards. The second I had that thought, it's like, why am I here with these yokels? I said to myself, this guy knows 20 things that I have no idea about. He probably is a world expert in one or two of them.

Right. You know? And for me to sit here and have this kind of, you know, this kind of condescending attitude This is the problem with trying to run things from... The problem with the country is there's a group of people in Washington who six or seven bright guys sit in a room and they think they know more about running the gas station

than the guy who runs the gas station. They're all bright in the same way. But they actually seem to think that they're smarter than 320 million people. And I was so ashamed of that thought and I was so proud of myself for just smacking myself, you know? I thought, this guy is an expert

on things that really matter, you know? I mean, I'm coming out of working in Hollywood as an editor, and this guy knows how to grow food, you know? He's not the kind of guy who knows how to give notes on a show. By the way, I just had to get this out. If you've never worked in the Hollywood system, there is an entire mid-strata. So they're the people that make the shows. And they're talented, working people. Sure.

I mean, some of them are extremely talented. Sure. Mind-boggling. Yeah. And then there are the people who make the decisions. And in the middle is a standing army of mid-level, low-level network executives. and their job is to go and make notes. Now, they get paid $200,000 a year for their notes.

And so they can't come in and watch a show and just go, oh, my God, that's absolutely perfect. It's just beautifully edited. They have to touch it. They have to get their fingerprints on it. And some of these notes are so awful and so appalling that I tried to think of an example of what it was like, and here's what I came up with.

The notes that you would get would be something like, if one of these people were in there watching the final cut of Schindler's list, one of them would say something to the effect of, no, it's really powerful, Stephen. Now, I'm just spitball in here. I'm just throwing things against the wall. But just hear me out on this. What if Schindler were to have a talking dog? You know, what if you were up a talking dog and only Schindler could hear him?

And he could kind of explain things and kind of lower, you know, it's a little down. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. So these are the people who... Brighter. Yeah. These are the people who determine what we watch. The guys who want to have Schindler have a talking dog.

You're not exaggerating. I'm not. I mean, I've seen it. Nothing quite that extreme. But I did read one. I think it was the worst editing job ever inflicted on a movie. It was in South Korea and they released the sound of music over there. And it was long.

So they took the songs out. They took the songs out of the sound of music and argued, look, we still have a pretty compelling narrative here. I said, yeah, but you got a very confusing title. You do. So, should be just call it the of. Of. I had a steady job in Hollywood, which is, you know, it's like, yeah, just to have a,

I ended up being an editor on a show called Sunday Morning Shootout, which was Peter Bart and Peter Goober. These are major guys, and I admire them. I love them both. I love them both. And these guys had a talk show, but they're industry insiders, so there was like 175 episodes. I cut every one of those things. And so I got to hear some interesting things, but Peter Goober tells this story when he broke the deal to the Japanese.

And they're getting ready to close this big deal. You know, he made $750 million. This is a Sony deal. Yeah, and suited his partner, John Peters. So he's sitting there, these two guys from Hollywood, they're trying to close the sale on this Hollywood studio. And they're looking at this samurai guy, right? I mean, he's a Japanese manufacturer who went through the war.

You know, he's just like this stone factory. Right. They're trying to tell him how the film business works. So they said, look, here's how it works. we'll have a slate of 10 films, and we'll make 10 films in a year. And out of those 10 films, maybe four or five of them will fail. Two or three will do okay, but we'll have probably three hits that will cover all of this and make us a profit.

And the guy looked at him and he said, why don't you just make the hits? Yeah, what's so hard about that? It's a great question. And it's also the reason why show business is, so different. Because how many times have you heard somebody, either an ad agency or an individual or something? Well, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to make a viral video. That's the first thing. That's the first thing. And then we're going to release a hit song. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. And then we'll launch a successful franchise.

And nobody knows what's in that bottle. It's just magic. And you never know when it's going to be there. But if you're counting on it, then chances are real good that it's not showing. Right. And that's why, what do they say? We all know advertising works. 10% of advertising works. Just never know which 10% ever. Ever. There's a great rumination, too, on, like, what's the opposite of art? I think maybe the opposite of art is the focus group. Right?

I think, like, if you're really going to try and do something artistic, whether it's saving Private Ryan or a poem, whatever it is, if you're writing it or making it for the audience you either want to have or think you have, then you've left the realm of doing something truly great, I think, and entered another perfectly acceptable realm, call it the realm of commerce, and then you're going to stick your wet finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing,

and then you're going to start making all kinds of decisions. And as Chuck's heard me say a gazillion times, I value focus groups, but I'm very aware of the fact that what they're good at is getting rid of the really bad ideas and the really great ideas and leaving us with that soft, squishy middle that you described occupies most of Hollywood.

That's why we are where we are in the center. Mediocrity rises to the middle. Real quick. And when you were saying what the opposite of art was, I thought you were going to go with engineering. And I remember, because I live in both these worlds. I don't know how. I mean, I'm a writer and an editor, storyteller, all those things.

But I also have a really good science background, and I'm a pilot and all that. So I kind of live in this sort of Venn diagram, like the vice president would tell you. It's a remarkably interesting thing. But I kind of live in the middle. So all my actor friends had me do their science and work for him and all my nerd friends had me do their humanities own work for him.

So when you said, I thought the opposite of art was engineering, and I had a problem with this, and then I suddenly realized, you know what, which side of this am I on? And I finally came to the conclusion that I would rather hear an engineer sing a torch song than drive over a bridge designed by an actor. No kidding. Amen. But, look, art and engineering smashed together gave us the point.

Brooklyn Bridge, gave us the Golden Gate, gave us the Mighty Mac. Yes. There is so much artistry in the craft of engineering. That's right. They're both looking for the truth. One of the things that we seem to have such a plague of these days are, they're not even experts, because experts know what they're talking about. We have intellectuals.

To me, intellectualism is intelligence that's been left in the fridge for six months. It's not the same thing. And so you have these intellectuals who think they know all of these things, but they don't know anything really. They just know that they know things that they don't know. It's the certainty. And it's, yes, and since they're so certain that they know everything, we end up with this mediocrity. And I was telling you a few moments ago about that professor who picked up all the tabs, you know, for us. This would be quite a long time ago. This would be

in the, probably 83, 84, and way before AI. But this guy really, really, Dr. David Shelton, his name was. And one night, late at night when we were all completely Smash talking about art and life and things. They had just come out with a film that had, the audience had buttons and the film would reach a certain branching point and the audience would decide which way they wanted the story to go. Sure. And David Shelton said, this is the end of writers. Yes. It's the end of writers. And even then as a young well, you know, wet behind the ears, I just said, no, David, that's just the opposite. If you give the audience the chance to tell the story, they're always going to want the protection.

to win. They're always going to want the protagonist to win. And if you don't get the protagonist dirty, then there is no win. Then you just got a Mary Sue. The audience will always choose the best possible path for the hero, but the guy's not a hero unless he takes the worst possible path. And that's how you wind up with a talking dog at the end of the list. Exactly. And this is why so much modern entertainment is such garbage. People talk about woke politics. It's not the politics. It's that the people who are writing now have never been outdoors. And I don't mean outdoors in the sense of like, you know, working with their hands. They don't know anything about life. We were talking before we started rolling, you know, I mean, Gene Roddenberry won the air metal. All of these guys that created these great shows, watch their friends just turn into pink mist. They give you something to write about, you know? And now you've got people who are not only not experiencing these deep, traumatic events that make you stay up at night and just decided,

got to get this out of me. But they're not exposed to any conflict. And we look at these shows that come out. Why is this such pavolm? What do you expect from people who've never had a chance to say I was wrong or no or I never thought of it that way? Well, they're writing second, third, and fourth hand.

They weren't actual witnesses or participants in events. And so they turned into like the dead cat in Pet Cemetery who comes back, right? Church was his name. It looked like the old one. Yeah. But something might quite right. with church. Or like maybe better Michael Keaton in a multiplicity.

Maybe you get these versions and these versions. Just keep degrading. I think the degradation that you're talking about is clear and present and scary as hell for anybody who cares about art. But I also think a lot about the risk-reward model in the fat part of the bat you described, these decision makers, right? Getting dirty jobs off the ground was a tough sell. And it was tough because...

there hadn't been anything like it. And if you green light a thing that doesn't resemble anything and it fails, you're out. If you greenlight a thing that looks a lot like another thing and it fails, hey,

you gave it a shot. I mean, who knew? I called it Starways. How was I to know that it wasn't going to fail? I mean, my God, 98% of the way there. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments.

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You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. So here's David Sheldon, assuming risk most professors don't, picking up tabs when he's not required to do it. Challenging his kids, probably over a frosty beverage. And that's why I learned everything. I learned everything from him after school. Okay, so let's go there. I need to, in the time we have, blow an extraordinary amount of sunshine up your butt for the work you're doing on Daily Wire. Can it bring some people in?

I think we're rolling. We're actually rolling here. Okay. Yeah. So we have evidence. I really need to talk to you about that because it's transformational. Very quick sidebar,

he-ha, friends, Google Roy Clark guitar. Yeah, yeah. And just watch that. He does things that are... Reagan was so right, one generation away from forgetting.

It's the same thing with art. It's the same thing with music. I mean, the stuff he did on that crazy show with junior samples and Buck Owens, he put on a clinic, a musical clinic. And watch his face especially. You'll be amazed by what he does and the sound he makes. But watch his face. That's the face of a guy who knows that he's the best in the world.

He's not showing off. He's enjoying the fact that he's able to do this. He's always got that little tiny little smile, like, you know, like, I don't know if anybody else could do this. People who are successful are drawn to people who are better than they are. That's why this whole risk averse, we can't compete, we can't, you know, everybody gets a trophy thing. That's why it's the end of everything. If you really care about what you're doing, you don't want to see that you're better than other people.

You want to see people who are better than you are. You bet. Now, I've never had that experience. You have it every day. But you're having one right now. I can't believe it. No, but seriously, I'm not trying to drop names here, but as I mentioned, I've done probably 200 speaking events. And I've seen politicians, I've seen pundits, I've seen lots and lots and lots of people.

And I've never seen anybody was as good at running a room as I was, with one exception, and that was when I got a chance to introduce Glenn Beck. And I had a real fun introduction, and he and I had a lot of fun, and I'm sitting there, and I'm watching him,

and I'm thinking, it's like walking into Yankee Stadium, you know, you got 102-mile-an-hour fastball, and you're thinking, all right, here I am, and then there's just nine guys up there that are throwing 108-mile-an-hour fastballs, and all of a sudden you're thinking it.

But I remember watching him, and I was so impressed by how good he was and my thought was, I think I could take him, but I'd have to be on my A game. Yeah, right. There's no animosity, there's no, it's not even competition. It's like a- You sit up straight. Yeah, it's like I'm grateful to him for making me use all of it. You know, I'm, you know, my foot was glued like lead to the floor, that's all there

is and there ain't no more. And that's a wonderful feeling. It was only it several years ago when somebody told me that the Greek definition of happiness was using all of your facilities to their maximum ability. That's what human happiness is, is doing what you're good at and doing it as well as you can do it. And people who don't have that experience, and I don't mean this in a flipway, I genuinely feel sorry for them. And I think you could solve most of our problems in society. If you could just get people enough experiences for them to find something that they actually

love and then let them know that feeling what it's like with, well, that was pretty good, but what I just did was better. Most writers can't read their, I can't read anything I've written in the past. I never knew why. It's because it sucks. And it didn't suck. It's just presumably I've gotten better. If I ever go back and read things that I wrote and I thought, that was fantastic, you know, I'm on my way out. Yeah, yeah. Well, what's more satisfying? Winning a game of cards against somebody who really doesn't understand the rules. Right. Or knowing that you played the cards you got as best as they could possibly be played by any mathematical measurement.

And maybe you lost. But the cards you got, you played. The satisfaction of doing that seems to have been rubbed down, right? We're not focused on that. But that Greek maximization of talent and abilities is huge. And it reminds me, too, of the Aristotelian definition of a tragedy, of course, which is the moment in the narrative when the protagonist comes face to face with the undeniable. yet surprising truth of his own identity.

Those moments, and they're in the stories you tell, whether you're thinking about it or not, but those Anagnorisis, those peripatias, those things stick with people in the same way David Shelton stuck with you all these years. And in the same way, I bet you can remember the first time you came face to face with a scene partner back in the early part of your misspent career,

who was as good or better than you on stage. That would have been the first time I ever went on stage and every other time subsequent. I was not a terrific actor, but I know exactly what you're talking about. For example, sometimes people who know me say, oh, you know, Bill, you must be some kind of control freak because you want to do all this stuff yourself. I don't want to do post-production things. I don't want to do any of it by myself. I'm just doing it by myself because I haven't found anybody can do it as well as I can do it, but God, I sure wish I could. And then back in 2000, early 2018, end of 18 or early 19, Daily Wire asked me to do a four-part series on the Apollo,

program and that's where I live. So I said, yeah. And I was very, very proud of what I wrote. But when I walked into the set, they made this set that looked like an underground bunker. It was like from 1965, there was like the radioactive bomb shelter thing. They had a working model of the Apollo control console. They had a museum grade Apollo moon suit. And just walking onto that set just made me feel like, oh Lord. But the thing that really blew my mind was when I saw the first rough cut and what the editors had done and all of the stuff. I said, I've never seen this footage. I've been researching this for six months. I've never seen this. And when people come along and make what you've got better, it's just, you know, you just want to buy everybody lunch, you know.

It's just like forever. It's like, this is fantastic. David Shelton, you want to pick up the tap. Absolutely you do. And he was an amazing guy. And there have been a few of them like that. Those kind of educators are not even in it because they love the education aspect. They're in it because they just love the experience. They love talking to kids. And by the way, I just have to add this because this is important part of him. He was vicious. I did a scene for him, and I thought it was pretty good.

You know, finished, and I'm standing there. He just looked at him. He just looked at him. And everybody thought he was cruel. He was cruel. And at the time when we were these kids, you know, just fledgling kids, we thought he was being cruel to be mean. But many, many years later, when I went back and talked to him, I said, you were really hard on some people.

He said, I had to be hard on them, Bill, because they have no talent. They are either going to find that out now for me, or they're going to spend the next 10 years of their lives. They're going to spend the next 10 years of their lives trying to believe in something that they simply don't have. It's not a question of can't teach them. They don't have it. I'm doing them a favor.

And I thought, wow, man. American Idol. Talk about tough love. You bet. Simon Cowell built a whole career on it. Yes. And thank God he did. You know, I talk about that a lot.

that among my favorite moments on television were the early episodes when 22-year-olds who had been told their entire life, that they could be anything they wanted to be. You and I have seen the exact same clips we know exactly who were talking about. That's the parapetia that Aristotle was talking about. The moment in your own heroic journey

when you realized that everything you thought you knew about yourself was wrong. You thought you were gonna be an American Idol because you wanted to be. You thought you were going to be a great singer because you wanted to be. Well, here's a format that allows us to meet those people when they come face to face with the fact that they can't carry a tune in a bucket. Here's the wrecking ball of reality right in front of you.

Amazing. And none of them can accept it. Not one. I don't remember ever seeing that. Do you remember ever seeing on the worst American Idol editions from 10 years ago or whatever? Do you remember ever hearing him say, you just can't sing? Have you ever heard one of them go, well, that never occurred to me, really? You know what?

No, no, no. It's always, no, no. Everybody says, I'm the greatest way. Well, I'm, all right, screw you, Simon. I'm going to be the biggest star in the history of the world. You're going to realize this was the moment you could have signed me and you didn't. Do we need that Simon Cowell thing? Yes.

Everywhere right now? Absolutely, yes, yes. I mean, God. These people that go into those auditions, every one of them are like magna cum laude graduates of Dunning Kruger University. You know? They're like top of their class. So for those of you out there who may not. I've been familiar with this.

A couple of psychologists discovered something that they called reasonably enough. The Dunning Kruger effect, and the Dunning Kruger effect basically says that the less you know about a certain field, the more highly you rate yourself in terms of ability in that. So if you know nothing about singing, your chance of thinking that you're a great singer is very high. If, on the other hand, you really are a great talent and you know the nuances of what it takes to be a great singer, you tend to underestimate your abilities because you're aware of how much you don't. know and how much left there is to improve. And so, yeah, this is Dunning Krugerville. I mean, everybody out there now is so unaware of, since no one has ever sat them down and said,

no, this isn't the best piece of artwork that's ever been drawn, you know, Erasmus or whatever your kid's name is, you know, with the indigo aura and all the rest of it's like, Arasmus? Yeah, why not? It's like, if all you do is tell them that everything they do is the best, then they have zero chance of being good at anything. How are they going to get to be good at? anything. How are you going to be a decent baseball player if you don't keep score? Do you think, though, that when these American idols who go up there and Simon Cowell tells them the truth, do you think when they go back and watch the DVR of their performance that they look at it and go, maybe he's got a point. I don't think that has ever happened. I think that's how deep in denial

you have to be to be that bad and to be that convinced that you're that good. I agree, but I also think there's something to the Heisenberg, you know, the uncertainty principle. that happened later in American Idol, where people realized, oh, format, acts, expectations, I'll play the role of the deluded, such and such. Saw it all the time in reality TV. It happened to dirty jobs. By the time the third season came,

people had pretty good idea that the toilet was supposed to explode or that I'm supposed to catch the semen from the turgid bull, right? And then something outrageous is supposed to happen. That's a doubt I wanted so badly. My whole life and you sent of a gun. It's the only one on your resume that's actually not listed. That's because I couldn't bear to put it down. But look, I think what you're talking about,

I always see it in terms of certainty and how we got so long uncertainty. And in the same way, I think a focus group is the opposite of art. I would have said once upon a time that uncertainty would be the opposite of certainty, but it's not. I think the opposite of certainty is either humility or maybe curiosity.

And when you lose both those things, then you get this creature that we've been talking about who rises to the middle and with no appreciation for the risk-reward paradigm protects his own flank, listen, there's our ride. Thank God. That really should be the soundtrack of this podcast.

Well, we do have to consider where we are while we're shooting. It is, right, at this moment. Well, we are in Santa Monica. I wonder where they're going. I wonder what the call is. What's the hurry? What's there?

Honestly. Where's the fire, fellas? Right. Take it easy. Look, this is way too much fun. Can I say one more thing about this tragic flaw thing? Yeah. Because I did...

Because you're just cutting into the part where I blow the sunshine up your butt to talk about the thing you've devoted your whole life. Oh, no, there's more sunshine coming. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, I'm trying to funnel it. So I did Apollo 11 for Daily Wire. I did the Cold War for Daily Wire. Then I did America's Forgotten Heroes. And that series I was interested in because...

I was interested in because I knew there were a number of stories that were really incredible that nobody heard about. And my first choice for that was John Paul Jones, but my second choice was Frank Luke. And then I managed to convince... Who? Frank Luke. Okay. So then I managed to convince these guys to let me write a feature film screenplay about

the life of Frank Luke and tell his historical story as accurately as it was possible to tell in a dramatic format instead of a documentary format. Frank Luke was a World War I Ace. Frank Luke was the leading World War I Ace. Frank Luke ran a streak where he shot down 18 airplanes and 17 days. He was known as the balloon buster and everybody thinks, oh, balloon, how hard is a balloon? Well, first of all, you put 100 rounds in a balloon and it just gets a little soft. They're the most defended targets there are.

You can make the point that the only reason you have an Air Force at all is to shoot down the enemy's balloons because artillery is what killed people in World War I and balloons are there for artillery spotting. So Frank Luke has been completely forgotten. And when you see the pictures of him, there's two or three pictures of him when he was a fighter ace. He's leaning against his spad, and he just looks like a bird of prey. He just looks like a stone cold murderer, which is what he was at that point. However, however, when I started learning about this guy, I found out that Frank Luke, among other things, was a bare-knuckle fighter in the minds of Arizona in 1914, 1915 as a kid. He was a all-state, state champion fullback.

And after he stopped prize fighting, he tried to think of a way to make more money from these minors. So he opened a dance studio, and he taught minors how to dance to give them a better chance to get wives. And Frank Luke would wear a dress and teach these minors how to dance. And I thought, no, there's something.

No, no, really. Oh, my God. There's something really. And to be clear, these are minors in helmets going under the earth, not 16-year-olds. So there's something about this. Thank you for the clarification. And he was, he got to the front and he kept dropping out of formation with these mechanical

issues. And every single person in his squadron was convinced that he was a coward and a braggard and a braggard and a liar because he had been a state champion Shultfell back and he wanted to get in the game. And he kept coming back late. He wouldn't come back till the next day. He's a coward. He wasn't a coward.

He couldn't wait. He couldn't stay in formation. He'd fake engine trouble and then just head out over German territory. himself and try and shoot down something. And the more he tried to do this, the more they hated him, till finally he flames this balloon. And in the space of 17 days, his air-to-air victory record was unparalleled against the most dangerous targets there were. He shot down three balloons in one day after his entire squadron had shot down two balloons in six months. And Luke was, he had this girlfriend who he never cheated on. He became briefly very famous. One, he went to him.

to Paris. They sent him on Paris leave. All these beautiful French girls are falling down over him. He just leaves Paris. He goes back to the field. He says, I'm bored there. He writes letters to his girl back home, who he met for 29 days and never saw her again. But he was famous

for, he was eventually shot and killed on a balloon-busting mission. And the story was that he landed his airplane. He said, they'll never take me alive. Which he did say. And the story was, the story I heard growing was that he landed his airplane, jumped out of the airplane.

There's a German patrol coming. He pulls out his 45, boom, boom, boom, boom, seven dead Germans there on the scene, you know, and then he's shot and killed. Well, that's not what happened. When I realized that that wasn't true, I thought, oh, God, please, not another one of these things where every heroic thing that we believe in turns out to be false.

I don't know what the name of that guy, Andy Ruins everything or whatever. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's ruined entertainment. But what actually happened was he got shot through, both lungs, and he manages to land his plane, and he can't get out of the plane because he can't move his arm. So he gets up, instead of swinging his legs over, he gets up on the side, goes over backwards like a scuba digger does, into the mud. He starts crawling towards these bushes. He can hear this German patrol coming after him.

His lungs are filling up with blood. Every breath he takes is getting harder and harder and harder. Then he finds himself lying face down in the mud. It's just about dark in France, 20th, September 9. And somehow he rolls over with his face in the mud, gets his hands in front of him, pushes himself up to his knees, gets up, he's now so blood-depreged, he's having hard time seeing, he's graying out. He hears these Germans coming. He pulls out his 45, and then the guys come through the bush, and there he is lying dead looking up at the sky. His fatal flaw, his character flaw, was that he could not tolerate authority.

And he had the very bad fortune of having a real Martinette as his squadron leader. The tragedy about Frank Luke is the day of his last mission, this Martinette, who was his squadron commander, said, I'm court-martialing him. This is America's number one fighter race. This is the pride of Arizona. He has done something no one else has done. before. I grew up in Miami on Rickenbecker Causeway, so I knew who Eddie Rickenbecker was. Every picture of Eddie Rickenbeckers got this big old grin, you know, just a tremendously popular

guy. But by this time, Luke had five or six kills overridden back. Here's America's Ace of Aces. Nobody liked him. Nobody wanted to talk to him. But Rickenbecker liked him. And on that last mission, Luke is at this forward base. He knows if he comes back to his regular base, he's going to be arrested and court-martialed because the Martinette, as it turns out, is right. You cannot have an individual running their own army flying when they want to in complete disregard of orders. You just can't. And as they're trying to figure out what to do, they said, we'll take Luke and we'll transfer him out of Grant's squadron out of the 37th and we'll put him in the 94th. He'll be in Rickenbecker squadron. He and

and Rickenbacker are friends. They're going to form this incredible team. And while they've got this stuff worked out, Luke takes off and he knows the only way he can come back is if he shot down three balloons. Look what I did. And so he's ends up getting killed because his rebelliousness could not be brought under control. And the people that flew with him, including the guy who was his wing commander, who'd been shot down by Rick Toffin, many, many pilots said that they'd seen Frank Luke fly and said that if you had Frank Luke up against the Red Baron, Frank Luke would have had him done in less than two minutes. I love stories like this seven years ago. A guy named Ben,

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E-HAL! So here's what I take from all of that. What's wrong with our military today is not so dissimilar from what's wrong with our educational system today, especially in the higher ranks. We have a one-size-fits-all solution. We have a series of standardized tests, and we really force people.

We really force people from an early age, right? I mean, if you read the Frederick Taylor stuff around the turn of the century, the protocols that came from the factories into education. Yeah, that's right. Mind-bogglingly stupid. But if I were a commanding officer,

what do I do with the Frank Luke? I can't beat him and whip him and pull my own hair out because he won't play nice unless I just decide that no amount of extra talent, no amount of alternative wiring is going to be acceptable. Or shouldn't it be incumbent on me to figure out how to use that jagged little pill to wreak the havoc he reed? Well, that's how the story actually got to be a story, because while his squadron commander,

the guy who was originally in charge of the squadron, was a guy named Major Hartney. And Hartney took Frank up for his first orientation flight in a combat squad. He's obviously been trained before and stuff. And he just goes up and says, Frank, let's just see how well you can fly and stuff. And Luke is just running circles around the guy. And when he comes back and develops the gun camera footage, Major Hartney sees, you know, the crosshairs over his head. He says, I've never seen anything like it.

He's not only a great pilot, he's a great shot. So Hartney knew how to deal with him. Hartney had been a Canadian, been there since 1915, came to train American troops, and he said, I learned how to get the best out of every pilot, so I treated him all a little differently. But Hartney then gets bumped up to command the entire wing of force squadrons. Luke's squadron gets taken over by this Martin named Grant,

and Hartney is constantly flying top cover for Luke, constantly making excuses for him, constantly, you know, letting him go. Until finally the guy who's below him says, major, either I'm the squadron commander or I'm not, we have rules or we don't. And if we don't, then we don't have an army. If we don't have an army, then we don't have a war. So are you going to continue to allow this guy to openly disrespect me and be insubordinate? Or are you going to do your job and enforce the rules?

And all this stuff happens in the space of two or three hours while Frank Luke is warming up his airplane to go off on this final suicide mission that he did that was so dangerous because he thought the only way out of this mess he'd gotten himself into was to come back with the victories. There he is right now. There he is right now.

Oh, and by the way, I mentioned that he looked like a bird of prey because he does. There's a picture of him graduating from flying school six months earlier. He looks like the son of the guy who was in the pictures. L-U-K-E. L-U-K-E. The final thing about this is

there's a picture of him where he's just shot down a plane. Almost all the combat happened over German lines, so if he'd shoot down a plane, it went down over Germany. But he got a two-seat observation plane over Allied lines. He lands, he's just lost his best friend, the only two outcasts in the whole thing. They were a flying team. His friend, Warner's not coming back. He lands outside on this field in Allied lines. He sees the wreckage of this airplane. The news gets out that the Frank Luke, America's Ace of Aces, the Arizona Balloon Buster, has shot down a plane and get down there real quick with their camera. so the Army sends some photographers down there.

And they say, hey, Lieutenant, can we get a picture of you in front of this airplane? And so this picture of him where he just looks so haunted and he's got crow's feet on his eyes and he's just got the thousand-yard stare. And I'd seen this picture so many times. I thought, what a mean son of a bitch, this guy is? And then I realized, no. His only friend has just been missing. He's gone, which we know what that means.

And he's standing in front of the wreckage of an airplane and there's a dead German observer two feet behind his right boot inside the records. And then I realized, what the hell would you expect from a 22-year-old kid at that point? There's a picture of him in front of his spad. The next day he's looking like this,

and you're thinking, how come he can't be cool like Eddie Rickenback? Rickenback where he's all smiles. He'd slept under the wing of this airplane. His best friend is gone. He knows he's not going to be able to survive this thing. And when you look at him six months earlier, he's got the sparkle in his eyes,

he's got this smile. He's this, you know, all-state, fullback. Everybody loved me. He was so popular. He'd just go out riding for 150 miles out to Fort Apache from Phoenix. And I thought this is so interesting. And there's nothing I can do to improve

on this, which is why it's so hard to write. Because it's like a spline. I know where Luke was historically. And now I have to invent this story of him. I have to create this guy. But this creation has to go through those spline points.

That's the only data I have. When I think about him and what he did and the fact that no one has heard the name before, Luke Air Force Base in Arizona is named after him as the first Congressional Medal of Honor recipient that was a pilot. And you glossed over something. He was 22. Yeah. 22. We were talking offline about Masters of the Air and hoping that it gets the same sort of exponential gravity.

financial gravitas that Band of Brothers and the Pacific had. We'll see. But I thought it was interesting what you said about the real tribute it has the potential to pay is to accurately capture the hell that it meant to be in a ball turret or a tail gunner or any one of those crews on those B-19s, right? I mean, that was a different kind of hell. We've seen the trench warfare. We got the Vietnam thing.

We've certainly, when that landing craft opens up. in the first moments of saving private Ryan. You guy just disintegrates. And, you know, as hard as it was to watch, I really think that that's the greatest service, Spielberg did in that... It's the best moment in the movie. Right?

It's just so visceral. You don't need dialogue. Right, exactly. The ramp goes down, and you've seen this 100 times before. The ramp's going down, you can hear the machine guns, and some guy's going to go, ugh, ah. No, they don't go, uh. They just disintegrated.

It's just bone flying through the air, and bone chips hitting the camera and stuff. He just disappears. And my dad, who was a World War II veteran, he got to Germany in April of 45, so he was not in combat. He got there two weeks before the end of the war. He lived long undersea,

saving private riot, and he said that opening sequence was like, yeah. So my dad, as a 22, 23-year-old, had a, I've got a picture of his graduation class, and on the back of it, all these 22-year-olds were asked, what do you think he'd be doing, you know, a year from now, two years from that.

And three quarters of them said, I expect I'll be killed, you know, fighting for my country. I mean, I remember once, I think I told you this, Chuck. I was narrating something inconsequential, amazing destinations or something at a recording studio in D.C. And next to me, a guy was narrating an episode on World War II. It was one of the end. I think it might have been the 50th. I don't know what it was, 60th. Was it Charles Derning by any chance?

Yeah. Yeah. It was Charles Durning. And I did four hours of wall-to-wall narration, and this guy was still working on the hour. And I went over and sat with the engineer. Because I'm like, you know, what's Charles Durning? What's taking him so long?

Well, he had to step out of the booth every five minutes or so to compose himself because he was there, right? And so here you've got this guy that most people might remember from what, Tutsi or something. The greatest little whorehouse in Texas. Right, right. But he was that 20-year-old there, and everybody around him was turned to mist.

And he, toward the end of his life, is telling that story, right? And I just was just so blown away by the, how hard it was to do that, because he's reading the picture. Right. That's hell of the thing. We're both in similar lines of work, you know.

And the most emotional moment I've ever had, because sometimes, you know, when you do an interview, you have a pretty good idea what you're going to ask, but sometimes something happens that you're not expecting and they're not expecting, and it's not a performance anymore, it's not a job anymore. It's like you are now in real time. Many years ago, one of the first things I did was a start of a series I wanted to do called a soldier's story, and it was, I found a guy named Leon. I want to say his last name was Cooper. I'm embarrassed to say, I can't remember for certain, but I know it was Leon. And Leon was a Higgins boat captain, and the Higgins boats for those.

be not familiar with a little landing craft in the Pacific that would swim out off of the troop ships and then they'd go ashore. Primarily made of wood. Yeah, that's right. So much like the beginning of saving private Ryan, very similar kind of thing. And he was not only a captain of this,

he was also in charge of like the entire first wave. So he had flags to keep everybody in line so they'd go ashore. So this is what I knew about him. And I said, so where was your first, because he was at EO? And I thought, wow, the EO story's going to be incredible. But he was, There was a tarawa.

And for those people not from here, it's not like the Navy or the Marines don't care about this. They spent a great deal of time figuring out when to send these guys ashore in terms of tide and so on, but somebody had made a mistake. It was a neap tide or a weird flunk tide or something. And these Higgins boats that were supposed to get these guys to the beach ran aground 700 yards off the shore. And they couldn't go any further, so they had to drop the ramps. And then the Marines had to go out with 150 pounds a pack.

And when you watch the footage, the water is just boiling with machine gun fire. You know how hard it is to walk. That's kind of exercise to get people for cardio walking through water. You've got these kids walking through water and the mortars landing and they're hitting the boats. So I knew the basics of this. I knew enough about what happened there for me to be able to get Leon to understand that I'm not just some guy from, you know, entertainment tonight. You know what I mean? That I have some fundamental knowledge of it.

And he's telling me this story, and that's when it just hit me, Mike. It's like, I just said, you know, Leon, every time I think about these landings, I think, wow, it must be great to be in the boat. Because the guys go ashore, the ramp goes down, you follow the soldiers, and then that's the story you follow. You follow the combat. And the boat just goes zipping out, you think, lucky him. Yeah. You not only had to go back there, Leone, but the second time you went back, you knew what was coming. You knew everything.

He said, yes. And I said, you are watching guys coming down the cargo net on the second wave. Nobody knows what's happening on the first wave. But you're watching them coming down on the second wave, and you know what's going to happen to them, don't you? And he says, yes. He says, I'm Sharon. I'm the driver of the boat of death across the river sticks. I'm taking these young men in to be killed.

and that's what I'm going to be doing. That's my job. And the horror of that hit me. And as he's telling the story, he said, we were coming off the second wave. We were taken aboard, wounded from the first wave, trying to get it back to the ship. He says, I'm in my little pit

where I'm driving the Higgins boat, which are not very fast, you know, two knots or something, five knots, something. And there was a wounded guy lying next to me, and he didn't seem to be too badly hit. And we're on our way back out to the hospital, ship and this guy just reach over and grab my hand and he just looked at me and he said remember me and said yeah okay but I'll remember you whatever you know driving along turns

and looks at him he's gone so Leon remembered him I remembered him somehow or another it's on tape somewhere that guy has been remembered somehow and you think about all the hundreds of thousands of guys that weren't but the the crime that we're inflicting on young people by not telling them these stories. I mean, forget about all the politics of I don't love the country. I mean, just how much we're depriving them of the human experience, you know. 22-year-olds need to hear these kind of stories and realize that the people that did this were 22-year-olds. You've got what, you've got soy latte when you ask for almond milk.

The struggle is real. Yeah, the struggle is real. It's an actual crime to deprive these generations of this horror. It is, but it's not the... It's not their fault. No, it's not their fault. They didn't educate themselves. You're here today because I saw an episode of your most recent project, I think.

And that's all the time we have. And we're out. Bill, thanks for coming by. No, look, man, the overall project is called... An Empire of Terror. All right. And the episode I saw, Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin, starts in that great forest, the Taiga. Right?

Siberia. to itself. Unbelievable footage. And so when you say they need to hear these stories, we're in violent agreement, but I think they might also need to see them. And I think you have a really terrific format and formula. And I think the Daily Wire is probably a great platform, but you've got to get beyond it. Because what you've done, I would put on the same level as what my friend Sal Khan has doing with the Khan University, everything we talked about earlier with education. If every college graduate today from every institution were compelled to sit down and watch the 55 minutes I just watched, then I honestly believe that the arguments for socialism would to sand in their open hands.

There is no case to be made for it. The evidence demands a verdict. It's still right in front of us. It's still right there. So put that together for me and just accept one final compliment before you tell me how you did it It's not just that it's important. It's not just that it's good The thing I love most about watching it is how much you were clearly enjoying it back to art versus focus group I don't think you focus group this no I did not I think you wrote every word

The Daily Wire has given me complete absolute freedom to write whatever I wanted to Amazing yeah amazing. Amazing Congrats Thank you very much. It means an awful lot to me coming from you. I would hope so. Kind of a big deal. You wouldn't know it from the set, though. But seriously, so again, you and I, we have similar career paths. And so storytelling and presentation is, that's our job, is what we do.

Part of that is we have a rhetorical toolkit that we use. We know how to do the pause. We know how to do that aside. We have all these things that we know how to do. The episode just prior to this, I was talking about the Red Terror, which was London's Terror. By the way, when I started writing this, I thought this whole thing was going to be about Stalin, but it was not about Stalin. It was all Lenin.

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That's skills, USA.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S.S. U.S.S.S.A. It's all in it. And I wanted this to be a legal case, and I didn't want it to be an assertion from that conservative guy who's got an issue with Marxism. That meant I had to find everything in either Lenin's own words or in the words of contemporaries. That is first case. It's as close as we have to video evidence as we can.

So just about four days before I was ready to write this episode six about the Red Terror, I was so upset that I didn't have more data. And after digging and digging and digging, it's almost like Raiders of the Lost Dark in the bottom of the online library of Congress archives. I found a copy of a book that was written in 19, I was like 23, 24, about a guy who lived through the Red Terror, and it's first person. And so I spent the last 15 minutes of episode six

reading him verbatim describing what he saw. And he's got the pictures, and he's got the names. And we were talking about the rhetorical things. So I read this, and I wrote it, and I read it. And my entire purpose was to just punch people as hard as I could. And I'll just give you two quick examples about this wonderful Soviet state.

One of the things they used to do with people who had been bankers, we're not talking about archdukes, bourgeois, you know, banker, somebody who maybe had relatives overseas. The Bolsheviks would do something that they would call bourgeois gloves, and they take their hands and put them in boiling water for about three or four minutes, and then they'd pull them out and peel them off with hooks, and they'd just have little gloves sitting there.

Another thing that they did was kind of nice. They called ice statues. They would take people out in 60 degree below zero water, temperature, and hose them down, and they just froze into place. Yeah. So I'm just doing this whole list of things, and because the whole thing was essentially a 12-minute block quote, I needed something to make it clear

that this isn't me writing, this is a direct quote. So I took all the lights in the room down to blood red for this. And after I had run this litany of things, ended with this story about these children who had been so badly tortured that they were screaming and all these inmates so that they could never forget the sound of these children being just screaming. And after it was over, I didn't realize it until I saw the cut. I delivered this thing.

And when I'm finished with the last line, I just went, that wasn't something I just pulled out. There were many things I do pull out of the... Rhetorical toolkit. But this wasn't. This was a genuine deflation of having to carry this. These people were real people. And one of the points I make is there's not an educated person on this planet

who's never heard of Auschwitz, but nobody has heard of Colima. And Colima is probably tied with Treblinka on the leaderboard from hell. Probably 800,000 people were murdered in Colima. Nobody's ever heard of it. We don't have a sense. I mean, the numbers are so big. This is the problem. The numbers are so big.

I mean, if you had to draw a straight line from Lenin to unnecessarily, the unnecessarily dead, 100 million? That was the number I came up with. And I always had to be conservative on this. And sometimes you write a line you really like. And I had six or seven minutes in the final episode to wrap up with my personal thoughts. And I said, now, one of the biggest criticisms against this series is, is going to come from people who are going to say something to the effect of. He claimed that 200,000 people were murdered here, but in point of fact, there was only 30,000

people that were murdered here. And I said, see, that's a thing about communism. It gets you to say things like only 30,000 people were murdered here. And I felt responsible to those people, you know. I felt a real responsibility. I said to the producers from the beginning in the post-production, I said, the largest photographic archive in the world, I think, belongs to the KGB or the FSB. Because of these millions of people that they were ex-

forget the starvation, the number of people they executed, all had to be photographed. There's something nine million mugshots of people who were taken out. I said, I want to show as many of these pictures as possible. I want them constantly, constantly, constantly in the background. Well, this is the thing. It's great to have a toolkit full of handy rhetorical devices. But you've got to bring the receipts with a show like this. And like I love to say, the evidence does demand a verdict, and for the life of me, I don't understand how that evidence, never mind the very artful way that you've put it together, how has it been scrubbed out of higher ed?

How is it not mandatory? Why is the hammer and sickle not as revolting as the swastika? There it is. You know why? They got better PR. Yeah. A lot of professors tend to be left-leaning. They looked at this is the great failed experiment, and this is the defense of communism.

They didn't do it right. Well, they didn't do it right. They didn't do it the right way. Didn't do it the wrong way. They did it the only way. This is the only way to do it. Part of it is that. But to be honest with you, Mike, I think that a lot of it is much simpler than that.

With the Nazis, we had pictures, and with the Soviets, we don't. We had photos. We had bulldozers pushing bodies into pits. We had starving emaciated people in these camps that were either dead or just barely alive. And there's no photographic evidence of what the Soviets did. In Colima, which was the worst of the gulags, they had a cutoff point when it got to be too cold for these prisoners to go out and work. And that cutoff point was 60 degrees below zero. And the thing to remember is that these were political prisoners. So we're talking about musicians, doctors, teachers who are being

exterminated by working them to death. Dave Sheldon. Exactly. They were very clear about The Soviets basically said, we have to get all of the work we can out of a person within the first three months because after that they become useless. And after three months, then we just execute them, get new guys in. In other words, it's cheaper to replace the part than it is to fix it. That's the economics of the guloth. What was the quote? I think it was from Stalin that just sort of typified the cheapness of life.

One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. That's a good one. But there's another one in the thing I just watched that you did. Oh, Stalin said, death solves all problems. No man, no problem. No man? No problem. I don't have a drinking problem.

I drink, I get drunk, I fall down, no problem. It's the glibness of it. And the thing that genuinely, it doesn't even frighten me, it angers me about what I'm seeing in America today, has got nothing to do with the politics or camps or black helicopters or anything. It's the thing that comes back again and again and again about these Bolsheviks. They were theorists. They did nothing but sitting.

cafes and argue, are you a Bucharanite or are you more of a Lenin Trotskyist? And it was all theory. All of it was theory. All of these people were murdered because of a theory. And Lenin had to invert Marxism in order to make it happen so that he could gain power. These people were the most unscrupulous evil power insane theorists. And people were nothing more than just an abstraction to them. They are the antithesis of the American Revolution. They are the negative image of not only of America, they're the negative image of everything that is human. Everything to them was theory. And you would die for your, let me rephrase that, you would be executed for your theory.

And again and again and again and again, and I see these intellectuals and I see these college professors who are not, they're not going to kill millions of people because they're weanies, because they're gutless weanies, but they're doing the same thing. It's all in the head, right? There's no connection to reality, no connection to people. There's no connection to experience. I know we're running along. The last thing I just have to get in here.

The single great tragedy in an empire of terror is that when the Tsar, Nicholas II, the last Tsar's grandfather freed the serfs in 1861, he freed something like 90 million people who were property. These slaves were all white, by the way, just point that out. You could tell they're Caucasians because they were living under the Caucasus mountains. So he freed 90 million slaves, and he gave them large parcels of the people. of land and that's all he did. And so his son, his reward for freeing these serfs

was six assassination attempts, the seventh of which blew his legs off, killed him. But over the course of the time since then, with his son, these plots of land were, the term is it was unenclosed. So what it meant was that an individual peasant now would have a row that they could use, a row that they could grow crops on, or maybe two.

And they might have another six rows, but they'd be on the other side of the property. And in order to get to your other six rows, you had to walk over other people's rows. So these people are constantly at war with each other, and Russia is dying of starvation. This is the part that put just such a stake through me. There's a failed uprising in 1905 of the Bloody Sunday Revolution, and the whole country is rioting against the Tsar and the imperial Russian. And the most turbulent region turned out to be the most well-ordered,

because the guy who was governing was a guy named Piotr Stolipin. Stolipin is one of these guys who should be. He remembered the same way that Martin Luther King and everybody else is. Stalepin was brought from his province by the Tsar and was given the Department of the Interior and then made prime minister. Stalepin had grown up managing land. He'd grown up on a manner. He was relatively wealthy.

And so he had a giant piece of property that he had to manage. Stalepin then goes out to these communal areas and sees you've got these rows and you've got four rows over here and all this other stuff. And he says, this is insanity. No, no, no, no, no. We're going to take all of this stuff and just flatten it out. We're going to parcel them off into individual enclosed farms. You will get to grow as much as you want to.

If you make more money, you can hire other people, and you can do all these other things. In the space of four years, Russia goes from being a basket case to producing 30% more grain than Argentina, Canada, and the United States combined. Russia has the single largest growing GDP in the world. Russia is on top of everything. It is coming into the Western world,

like a locomotive. And this guy who's a practical man who would go out and talk to terrorists unarmed, big, strong, brave man, the antithesis of Lenin, who's this hunched intellectual in his cafes in Switzerland, arguing about this,

Sdilippin goes out there, and he just makes these common-sense reforms, and the country becomes paradise for which he's assassinated. And he was shot and killed in the Sydney Opera, in the Opera House, in the Kiev Opera House in 2011. But if he had lived, when the Tsar was overthrown, there were two revolutions in 1917.

The one that overthrew the Tsar was in February of 1917, and the provisional government took over, and it was run by a guy who was a good-hearted man named Karenski. But Kerenzky was an actor, and he was very flighty, and he was very vain. If Stalipan had not been assassinated, he would have taken over that provisional government. And the Russian people had a freely elected Congress that sat for one day, then the Bolsheviks closed it down. If he had lived, Russia wouldn't have been this pariah that it is to this very day.

It would have come into Europe as one of the economic superpowers of the world. And if Stilipin had not been assassinated, Stilipin was strong enough to take Lenin and his Bolsheviks, and he knew exactly what to do with those traders. They get money from Germany to do this. Krenzky could never see it. But think about this. If he hadn't been assassinated, if he'd taken over that provisional government, it doesn't just mean no Bolsheviks.

It doesn't just mean no Stalin. It means no South Korea, North Korea, no North Vietnam, no South Vietnam, no invasion of Hungary, no invasion of Czechoslovakia, no Cuba, no Poland, no Cambodia. None of it, gone. And to have that thing that close, it just broke my heart. It just broke my heart. And when you see him, the Stolip, and he's just such a kind man.

He had a big family, Lenin, didn't have any kids. You know, he said, just big family man. And these socialists try to kill him, and all they do is blow half his house off and kill 25 people and blow the legs off his 15-year-old daughter. And he just buckles down and goes back to work, doing what he's supposed to do. The past is what we choose to forget.

History is what we choose to remember. You've made some really great choices. I just love what you're doing over there. I can't recommend it enough. Seriously, parents, I don't know where your kids are studying, but if you want them well-rounded, venture onto the part of the map where it says, here be dragons, right?

There's so much good stuff to watch out there, but I really haven't seen anything better than this. It's over on the Daily Wire. It's opening in March, yeah. It hasn't been. It was originally scheduled for November, but we had so many pictures that we had to clear. You're still tweaking it.

It's a work of art. It was not focus grouped. I really can't recommend it enough. We didn't even talk about the ARA and the fact that these big, bad capitalists, you know, what the heck? Did you just throw something at me? Nothing but the finest here. No, no, just a little piece of phone fell off to do. You know what?

I'm going to take that as a sign. You should. Google ARA. Yeah, yeah. Because before he was president, Herbert Hoover did a hell of a thing. And the evil American capitalist swine came over and fed 10 million Russians until they realized that Lenin was stealing the American grain that the American people had volunteered

and selling it on the international market so that he could run his common turn to overthrow the United States. Amazing. Yeah, look, if you're just listening and not watching, a piece of my studio literally fell off of the ceiling and hit me in the head

and I'm taking that as a sign, Chuck. How long we've been talking? Too long. All right, Bill, thanks for coming by. You kidding, it was a great point in my first. Really terrific. And, yeah, Shelton. I'm glad you mentioned his name.

You were lucky to have it. Yeah, it was very lucky. All right, folks. Talk you next week. If you're done, please subscribe. Leave some stars, ideally five. Five lousy little stars. Point Ray's Farmstead Cheese has the perfect way to celebrate your graduate.

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